Mackerel skies and memories

Yesterday I sat out, weather now settled into a lovely series of days in the mid eighties, and here's the mackerel sky we had

Gerard Manley Hopkins used that wonderful term in his poem about dappled things, which I highly recommend for pure joy. 

And I remember as a very little kid being taken out in a small mackerel fishing boat on vacation at Staithes, on the north Yorkshire coast, 

and being scared to dapples when a live mackerel was brought in and leapt around my legs, ooh-er. His body was dappled and silvery, hence the name of that cloud formation.

Staithes, locally known as Steers, goes back to Viking times in recorded history, and has entertained more eminent people than your humble blogger, Captain Cook, for one, who apprenticed here. 

I know his stamping grounds pretty well, Marton, listed in the Domesday Book, Great Ayton, where I've never been able to get into the Captain Cook Museum.  Over the years on visits I've asked and always been told sorry, the key's lost! 

On to today, August Fifteenth, Feast of the Assumption of Mary, great big holiday in several countries in Europe, also the Americas.

I worked as an au pair in a French family in rhe late fifties before going to the uni, where my by-then-fluent French stood me in good stead in a competitive degree program in French Studies, with students with much better preparation from schools better than mine. 

That year my Parisian au pair family was in St Briac on the Breton coast on the Fifteenth. Then it was a fishing village, but now, looking for pictures for you I see it's gone up in the world.

First summer of actual sunshine I'd ever experienced, England at that time in a period where summer temperatures were lucky to get above 60°f and there were summers where you wore your coat over your hopeful summer dress. Quite a contrast to recent years.

Anyway the Fifteenth was a huge festival, parades, a procession with Breton bagpipes, playing right into church for High Mass. 

At the Elevation of the Host, a very sacred moment, usually there'd be just a bell chiming gently three times, once before the host in the monstrance was lifted, one at peak, as high as the priest could reach, one after it was lowered back to me altar.. 

On the  Fifteenth in St Briac, the bagpipes burst out again, big joyous shout!  It was great, people I'd seen around the village all now in traditional costume, most of them playing instruments. 

Brittany and Cornwall, county in the southwest of England, with its own Cornish language, have a long connection in language, myth and fable. Tristan and Iseult, all that.

They also have red haired people! My late Handsome Partner's hair was flaming red, from his Cornish heritage as well as his Scottish family. And some of the Bretons I met had his build and size and coloring. 

I didn't know him then, but years later I gave him a fisherman's sweater, my brother had passed on to me,a real one, with tarred waterproofed wool, which was the best fit he ever had. Shoulders broad enough,  sleeves short enough, clearly designed for his people.

Later that summer my au pair family finished up the season in Prades, in the Pyrenees, famous for being the home of cellist Pablo Casals. Too late for  the Casals music festival, oh well, they were not into music 

Wonderful history there, St Michel de Cuxsa one of the festival sites, ancient church. I still remember the warm southern smell of ancient stone and the foliage in the hot sun, fruity and dusty.

Again, different language, different local words, this being the land of southern French, not the language of Paris you learn as a student. 

The Parisian family was also struggling a bit with that, I was happy to note! I was permanently struggling with their two year old Bruno, whose own language frequently confounded me.

Then, suddenly, a few weeks earlier than planned, with the proposed return of deGaulle, the Algerian conflict, all that,  there was the very real prospect of civil war and my possibly being unable as a foreign national, to leave. 

My family, the Fontaines, scrambled to get me on a flight home, along with crowds of other foreigners. They rushed me to a small plane out of Nice airport, change in Paris, home to the UK. 

I'd already got special permission to defer my precious rare university place for one year, to allow for the time in France, and they wouldn't have accepted a mere civil war as an excuse to be late again.

I was a pretty intrepid teen, come to think of it. At this point I was 18, I'd made all the arrangements for the job and travel from England to Paris, to the au pair agency myself, as well as the uni details, there being nobody in my life with any knowledge of any of this. 

It being in the midst of the Algerian conflict, Paris streets were perilous for young girls. I was repeatedly warned never to walk on the edge of the sidewalk because there were car abductions for ransom, nor too close to buildings because of snatching from doorways and alleys! 

Abduction of young respectable girls for likely ransom was a form of rebel fundraising. Some hair raising tales of failed ransome attempts, too.

No wonder emigrating a few years later to the, then peaceful, US, knowing nobody but Handsome Partner, husband at that point , didn't seem like such a big deal. I mean, I wasn't even alone! 

You can accomplish a lot when you don't know any better.

Happy day everyone, ignorance is not always a bad thing, but courage and interesting adventures always come in handy. 

Photo AC